1. White Rose Grid Infrastructure Overview
Chris Cartledge
Deputy Director
Corporate Information and Computing Services,
The University of Sheffield

2. Contents History YHMAN Web site Grid capabilities
Current computation capabilities
Planned machines
Usage
YHMAN
Grid capabilities
Contacts
Training
FEC, Futures

3. White Rose Grid History
2001: SRIF Opportunity, joint procurement
Leeds led: Peter Dew, Joanna Schmidt
3 clusters Sun SPARC system, Solaris
Leeds, Maxima: 6800 (20 processors), 4*V880 (8 proc)
Sheffield, Titania: 10 (later 11)* V880 (8 proc)
York, Pascali: 6800 (20 proc), Fimbrata: V880
1 cluster 2.2, 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon, Myrinet
Leeds, Snowdon 292 CPUs, linux

4. White Rose Grid History continued
Joint working to enable use across sites
but heterogenous: a range of systems
each system primarily to meet local needs
up to 25% for users from the other sites
Key services common
Sun Grid Engine to control work in the clusters
Globus to link clusters
registration

5. WRG Web Site There is a shared web site: http://www.wrgrid.org.uk/
Linked to/from local sites
Covers other related projects and resources
e-Science Centre of Excellence
Leeds SAN and specialist graphics equipment
Sheffield ppGrid node
York, UKLight work

6. Current Facilities: Leeds
Everest: supplied by Sun/ Streamline
Dual core Opteron: power & space efficient
404 CPU cores, 920GB memory
64-bit Linux (SuSE 9.3) OS
Low latency Myrinet interconnect
7 * 8-way (4 chips with 2 cores), 32GB
64 * 4-way (2 chips with 2 cores), 8GB

7. Leeds (continued) SGE, Globus/GSI Intel, GNU, PGI compilers.
Shared memory & Myrinet MPI
NAG, FFTW, BLAS, LAPACK, etc Libraries
32- and 64-bit software versions

8. Maxima transition Snowdon transition
Maintenance to June 2006, expensive
Need to move all home directories to SAN
Users can still use it, but “at risk”
Snowdon transition
Maintenance until June 2007
Home directories already on the SAN
Users encouraged to move

9. Sheffield Iceberg: Sun Microsystems/ Streamline
160 * 2.4GHz AMD Opteron (PC technology) processors
64-bit Scientific Linux (Redhat based)
20 * 4-way, 16GB, fast Myrinet for parallel/large
40 * 2-way, 4GB for high high throughput
GNU and Portland Group compilers, NAG
Sun Grid Engine (6), MPI, OpenMP, Globus
Abaqus, Ansys, Fluent, Maple, Matlab

10. Also At Sheffield GridPP (Particle Physics Grid)
160 * 2.4GHz AMD Opteron
80* 2-way, 4GB
32-bit Scientific Linux
ppGrid stack
2nd most productive
Very successful!

11. Popular! Sheffield Utilisation high Lots of users: 827 White Rose: 37
Since installation: 40%
Last 3 months: 80%
White Rose: 26%

12. York £205k from SRIF 3 £100k computing systems £50k storage system
remainder ancillary equipment, contingency
Shortlist agreed(?) - for June
Compute, possibly core, Opteron
Storage, possibly 10TB

13. Other Resources YHMAN Leased fibre 2Gb/s Performance
Wide area MetroLAN
UKLight
Archiving
Disaster recovery

14. Grid Resources Queuing Globus Toolkit Storage Resource Broker
Sun Grid Engine (6)
Globus Toolkit
2.4 is installed and working
issue over GSI-SSH on 64-bit OS (ancient GTK)
Globus 4 being looked at
Storage Resource Broker
being worked on

15. Training Available across White Rose Universities
Sheffield: RTP - 4 units, 5 credits each
High Performance and Grid Computing
Programming and Application Development for Computational Grids
Techniques for High Performance Computing including Distributed Computing
Grid Computing and Application Development

16. Contacts Leeds: Joanna Schmidt
, +44 (0)
Sheffield Michael Griffiths or Peter Tillotson
+44 (0) , +44 (0)
York: Aaron Turner
,+44 (0)

17. Futures FEC will have an impact Different Funding models a challenge
Can we maintain 25% use from other sites?
how can we fund continuing GRID work?
Different Funding models a challenge
Leeds: departmental shares
Sheffield: unmetered service
York: based in Computer Science
Relationship opportunities
NGS, WUN, region, suppliers?

18. Achievements White Rose Grid: not hardware, services
People(!): familiar in working with Grid
Experience of working as a virtual organisation
Intellectual property in training
Success:
Research
Engaging with Industry
Solving user problems